Previously, experts thought the first feathered dinosaurs appeared about 150 million years ago, but the find suggests feathers evolved much earlier.

This has raised the question of whether many more of the creatures may have been covered with similar bristles, or “dino-fuzz”.

The team describe the fossil in the journal Nature.

Hai-Lu You, a researcher from the Insitute of Geology in Beijing, was part of the team that discovered the fossil.

He told BBC News he was “very excited” when he realised the significance of what his team had found.

He described the filaments seen on the body of the new dinosaur, which the team has named Tianyulong confuciusi, as “protofeathers” – the precursors of modern feathers.

“Their function was probably display, as well as to keep the body warm” he said.

Dr You’s team noticed that the filaments on the base of their dinosaur’s tail were extremely long.

These, they suggest, might have evolved for show, and may even have been coloured.

“The world of dinosaurs would [have been] more colourful and active than we previously imagined,” he said.

Muddying the water

Dinosaurs can be categorised into two large families – the Saurischia and the Ornithischia.

The Saurischia family includes the theropods – thought to be the ancestors of modern birds. Fossils of these dinosaurs have revealed that some of them were feathered.

But the newly-discovered dinosaur is a member of the Ornithischia group – all previously thought to have reptilian scales.

Professor Lawrence Witmer, a paleontologist from Ohio University, says this “really muddies the waters” of what researchers know about the origin of feathers.

It suggests that their origin might go right back to the earliest ancestors of all dinosaurs – more than 200 million years ago.

“The bad news is that something we thought was neatly wrapped up is now not so neat,” said Professor Witmer.

“We now need to rethink what the coat of the ancestral dinosaurs actually was.”

He added: “But the good news is that we can now look at existing evidence with new eyes – going back to old fossils and asking if there is evidence of any of these filaments.”

The team, who named the dinosaur after the Tianyu Museum of Nature, where the fossil is housed, also dedicated part of its name to the philosopher Confucius to reflect how it has changed the modern view of dinosaurs.

“Maybe all dinosaurs, even the predominantly scaled ones, had fuzzy parts,” added Professor Witmer.

“And if they were covered in a fuzzy coat, what does that tell us about their physiology? Perhaps they were warm-blooded.

“We now need to think completely differently about the evidence we already have.”

Fossils Found in China

Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

“This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire,” Borrini told Reuters by telephone. “This helps … authenticate how the myth of vampires was born.”

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 — in which the artist Titian died — on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around three km (2 miles) northeast of Venice and was used as a sanitorium for plague sufferers.

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse’s teeth, and vampires became known as “shroud-eaters.”

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the “undead” were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

“To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there,” said Borrini. “It’s possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized.”

While legends about blood-drinking ghouls date back thousands of years, the modern figure of the vampire was encapsulated in the Irish author Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula,” based on 18th century eastern European folktales.

Vampire unearthed in Venice plague grave